BWW TV Exclusive: Director to Director! Jack O'Brien Talks His New Memoir- 'Jack Be Nimble' with Richard Jay-Alexander; Plus Scoop on HOUDINI, THE NANCE & More

Three-time Tony winning director Jack O'Brien's memoir "Jack Be Nimble: The Accidental Education of an Unintentional Director" will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux today, June 18. For Jack O'Brien, there's nothing like a first encounter with a great performer, nothing like the sound of an audience bursting into applause. In short, there's nothing like the theater. In the special interview below, director Richard Jay-Alexander chats with his friend, with whom he shares a rich professional history, about what fans can expect from the new book. They also discuss the full range of O'Brien's career, including his currently Broadway hit THE NANCE and the upcoming HOUDINI by Stephen Schwartz, starring Hugh Jackman and with a new bookwriter that you have to watch the interview to find out about! Check it out below!

Following a fairly normal Midwestern childhood, O'Brien hoped to make his mark by writing lyrics for Broadway but was instead pulled into the growing American regional theater movement by the likes ofJohn Houseman, Helen Hayes, Ellis Rabb, and Eva Le Gallienne. He didn't intend to become a director, or to direct some of the most brilliant-and sometimes maddening-personalities of the age, but in a charming, hilarious, and unexpected way, that's what happened.

O'Brien has had a long, successful career on Broadway and as artistic director of San Diego's Old Globe Theatre, but the history of the movement that shaped him has been overlooked. In the middle of the last century, some extraordinary people forged a link in the chain connecting European influences such as the Moscow Art Theatre and Great Britain's National Theatre with the flourishing American theater of today. O'Brien was there to see and record it all, in beautifully vivid detail.

Jack O'Brien was born in 1939 and is an American director, producer, writer, and lyricist, who served as the artistic director of the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego from 1982 to 2007. He has won three Tony Awards and been nominated for seven more, and he has won five Drama Desk Awards.